Ten minutes before closing time on March 25, 1911, a fire broke
out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City and killed
148 people, most of them young women immigrants. This tragedy is
the subject of Ruth Daigon's chapbook, Payday at the Triangle. Actual photographs and clippings from news accounts of the tragedy are
interspersed with poems written in the voices of observers, survivors,
family members, and the victims themselves. This range of distinctive
voices and the use of present tense in the poems creates immediacy
and poignancy as the reader relives the horror of the event.

"Immigrants," the first poem in the collection, explores the thoughts
of the young women before they were exposed to the harsh realities of factory work:

Let us soak up the sounds of our new country
Let us fall headlong in love with America, wildly, willfully
and stretch out over the streets of New York
with all of us guaranteed heaven
and the warm promise of earth

The reader remembers these lines when "Watchers Down Below," tells of

girls in summer dresses speeding down heights of 80
feet 62 thud dead girls at windows framed in flames
like vaudeville stars lit up on theatre marquees girls in
windows looking so alive then quiet heaps of clothing
on the ground they keep leaping one two three at a
time

These poems also illustrate Daigon's control of difficult subject
matter. The jubilant tone of the first is just right for young
girls heading for a new life; the highly descriptive but harshly
matter-of-fact tone of the second delivers an unfiltered firsthand
account allowing readers to see and hear for themselves and grieve in their own ways.

Over half of the poems are named for individuals: "Mary Bucelli,
survivor" now wears "dark glasses / shutting out memories living
in half-light;" "Rosie Glantz, operator" runs through fire to escape
and then stands "on the street watching / Sophie Slemi and Della
Costello / arms tight around each other / step off a window ledge;"
"Rose Schneiderman, union organizer," asks why the factory owners
kept the doors locked, "a few seconds lost if we had to use the
toilet / Get a breath of air Say a word to a friend." And it
was these locked doors that prevented many victims from escaping the flames.

Payday at the Triangle not only pays tribute to the martyred girls, but also reminds us of the history of the labor movement in the
United States. Creating contemporary poetry from a socially and politically charged tragedy that happened almost a century ago is
a difficult undertaking, but Ruth Daigon succeeds. By giving the
women individual voices and supplying details of their apartments,
clothes, families, and worklives, she makes them real, and we mourn
with "Max Hochfield, brother of victim," who says, "Her clothes
still hang slack in the closet / A shoe fills with sunlight."